Britain and Hinduism 9: Ending the Kali Yuga

Bhima traveling alone through a forest finds the path blocked by a large monkey who claims to be too old and weak to move out of the way. The strongest of the Pandavas tries to lift his tail and pass by, but cannot move it a hair. Realizing someone of awesome power is before him, Bhima falls to his knees and asks the monkey who he is. It is Hanuman, the son of Vayu from a previous age, and thus Bhima’s older brother. In telling when he is from, Hanuman sums up briefly a uniquely Hindu aspect of Time: it has a moral dimension reflected in the quality of human virtue that changes in a cycle of four Yugas (eons).

In the first, the Krita (Perfect) Yuga, Virtue is whole and stands firmly on four legs. Life is effortless and the Vedas are an integral whole open to all eyes. In the Treta Yuga Virtue diminishes by a quarter but is still stable on three legs. Various diseases, lust, and natural calamities afflict people, and they undertake sacrifices and penances to avoid them. The Ramayana is set in the latter part of this period.

In the Dwapara Yuga half of Virtue remains intact, maintaining an unsteady balance on two legs. Dishonesty is a growing factor in human relationships and meritorious achievement requires great effort. The Vedas are in four parts and unknown to many. The war at Kurukshetra occurs at the end of this period and only Krishna’s presence on earth prevents the immediate onset of the degenerate Kali Yuga, when only a quarter of Virtue survives, standing unsteadily on a single leg. Evil is rampant in this final phase. Most people no longer remember the Vedas or know their own spiritual nature; only one in four is honest.

We are now in the Kali Yuga that began with the death of Krishna 16 years after the end of the Kurukshetra war. Gandhi’s political advent in South Africa a century ago marked the beginning of a period of transition, and the hugely positive changes since then signal that we are moving towards a new age of virtue. The Brahma Kumaris say we are now in a time of “Confluence,” with potential for revolutionary positive change.

How rapidly we realize that potential depends on each of us becoming aware that the corruptions of the Kali Yuga have blinded us to the nature of the world and of our own true selves. This whole series of posts has aimed to remedy that situation and in this one I look specifically at the origins and significance of Hinduism.

Who We Are

In September 2009, Nature published the report of a genetic mapping project by an Indo-American team of scientists that had studied some 500,000 genetic markers in a diverse sampling of the Indian population. As one of the senior researchers told the Press, the team found evidence that “castes grew directly out of tribe-like organizations during the formation of Indian society,” and that the proportion of shared genes in the population ranged from 49 to 80 percent.

That evidence blew out of the water the ludicrous colonial-era theory that the caste system was a means of preserving the racial purity of White blond protoEuropean “Aryans” from the Caucasus, the “original Brahmins” the British credited with composing the Vedas while driving their chariots and cattle up and down the high Himalayan passes.

The genetic evidence pointed to the emergence of the caste system from an accommodation among indigenous tribes.

How did that happen? 

Most probably, it was the result of a successful effort to end the conflicts endemic among the many tribes of India by compiling their sacred lore into a work all could revere, the Vedas. Supporting that theory is the fact that the Vedas are the only Hindu texts considered divine in origin (shruti); all the rest are remembered works of human composition (smriti). The distinction makes sense only if the former contains the ageless Seen reality (veda) of the tribes. It is likely the compilation was done by the Saptarishis, the seven sages memorialized by ancient tradition as the stars pointing to Polaris.

Modern readers usually find Vedic hymns repetitive and often mundane, but to their original tribal audiences they must have been powerfully evocative of their commonalities of worship and ritual. The hymns celebrated Agni, sacred to all as ruler of altar and the hearth, cleanser, protector, receiver of sacrifices and messenger to the gods. They praised all things the tribes held in awe, the Sun and the Moon, Wind Thunder and Storm, the starry wheel of heaven and the lovely dawn. They propitiated the gods of the hunt and husbandry, weapons of war and the tools that built altar and home. They expressed wonder at the eternal mysteries of the spirit-world that lay beneath the great cycles of seasonal growth, death and rebirth. In all things the Vedas made obvious the deep kinship of the tribes, ending conflicts and allowing them to settle into a system of interdependent castes.

The next step in the evolution of Indian society involved discussions (Upanishads) among the country’s best and brightest that led, over time, to a coherent philosophy, a universal worldview and a humane value system. The Upanishads postulated an indefinably abstract and undifferentiated Brahman as the basic reality of the universe. From its manifestation as the Universal Soul (Paramatma) there emerged the endless diversity of Creation, governed by a Law (Dharma/Rita/Satya) inherent in every particle and pervading the cosmic reaches of Space and Time. A flux of endless delusion (Maya) cloaked the unity of Vasudev Kutumbakham, God’s family.

The Upanishads asserted that individual souls are of the same divine substance as the Universal Soul and thus immortal; but blinded by Maya, they are unaware of their true nature and must learn of it through long experience of repeated material reincarnations. The most enlightened souls escape the cycle of rebirths by merging with the Universal Soul (moksha); all others continue to be reborn until the cataclysmic end of all things (pralaya) at the conclusion of a Mahayuga.

In this dispensation the highest attribute of virtue/wisdom is the dispassionate observance of personal dharma; death is of little consequence as it only opens the door to a new life; and possessions are a hindrance to those seeking a clear view of the realities governing their soul’s progress.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata

The spare and noble philosophy of the Upanishads entered the everyday life of India through the Ramayana and Mahabharata, composed millennia apart and entirely different in significance and spirit, but unified in their concepts of what is of value in life and what is without worth. Celebrated by every generation in sacred legend, drama, dance and song, the two epics laid the foundations of a unified Indian culture and consolidated it as a civilization. They also marked key stages in the political evolution of Indian society.

The Ramayana records and extols the step up from caste-federation to unitary State. It is important to note how differently this change occurred in Europe and India. In Europe, unity came through conquest and oppression. India accomplished the transition peacefully because the Kshatriyas already had the established role of ensuring security, and it was necessary only to define the qualities and responsibilities of the king.

The Ramayana takes that in hand. Rama is not a military dictator. In the devotion to his father, love for Sita, loyalty to Laxman, and generosity towards Kaikei, he is the archetype of the good family man. He goes to war not to extend his kingdom or for profit but to regain his wife. In misfortune, he is graceful, in victory, modest. Rama is the God-king next door, neighborly, considerate and kind. Those qualities make him accessible to all Indians regardless of caste or social status, a point the Ramayana is at pains to underline. The gods applaud Rama sitting comfortably on the ground with the lowborn forest-dweller Guha. The Prince of Ayodhya eats the fruit a poor woman offers him after biting into it to make sure it is sweet; Lakshman protests but Rama silences him; she acts out of love. That unforced love of the ruler is the basis for Ramrajya, the ideal State.

The Ramayana also makes clear the iron commitment necessary from the ruler. Rama goes willingly into exile to uphold a pledge his father made; he sends away his beloved wife because of murmurs among the citizens of Ayodhya that Sita’s pregnancy soon after returning from Ravana’s clutches implied a violation that made her unfit to be queen. The lesson in both cases is the same: the integrity of the ruler is the ultimate guarantor of the safety and security of the State; it must be beyond moral reproach. The personal happiness of the king cannot take precedence over that fundamental consideration.

Ravana serves as a negative foil to Rama in every way. Although a man of great accomplishments –thus the ten heads – he is arrogant, vicious, tyrannical, feared, and endlessly self-indulgent. Ramarajya is a time of golden contentment to the people of Ayodhya; Ravana’s rule brings disaster and ruin to Lanka.

The Mahabharata tells of a much later stage in India’s national life, when the ideals of Ramrajya are long gone and corrupt power-hungry men have control of the State. The whole work is a guide to survival in dark and confusing times. Ugrasrava, the narrator of the epic, lauds its high worth. “As the sun dispels the darkness, so does the Bharata by its discourses on religion, profit, pleasure and final release, dispel the ignorance of men. As the full moon by its mild light expands the buds of the water lily, so this Purana broadens the human intellect. With the lamp of history it illumines the whole mansion of nature.” The Mahabharata is the “fifth Veda” he says, outweighing the others because it makes their mysteries explicit.

Some 3000 years after its composition, the epic remains a sophisticated and surprisingly relevant work of political, philosophical and moral guidance. Consider, for example, the hidden significance of the origin and nature of the Pandavas and Kauravas.

Although always referred to as “cousins,” the two sets of siblings, are unrelated by blood. Pandu cannot father children because he is cursed with instant death if he has sex; his five sons are the progeny of different gods invoked by his two wives. Yudhisthira the firstborn is the son of Dharma. Maruti the Wind begets Bhima of immense strength. Indra king of the gods and wielder of the thunderbolt fathers Arjuna, the perfect warrior. The twin Aswins, skilled in the arts and husbandry that support life, are the parents of Nakula and Sahadeva.

Together, the sons of Pandu represent the strengths essential to any civilization: Law, Power, the capacity for war and the skills for peace. Despite their disparate parentage the Pandavas share an indissoluble brotherhood, and Vyasa clearly intends the brothers to exemplify India's unity in diversity; it requires no stretch of the imagination to see in Draupadi the beautiful and fruitful land that all of them love.

The Kauravas are also not the natural sons of blind Dhritrashtra. His wife Gandhari (from Gandhara, modern Afghanistan), is childless and becomes pregnant only through the magical intercession of Vyasa. Throughout the Mahabharata Vyasa’s appearance signals didactic intent, and in this instance it underlines a theme that drives the narrative to the end. Gandhari’s pregnancy is abnormally prolonged, and upon hearing of the birth of Pandu’s first son she loses patience and induces birth. What emerges from her womb is not a baby but a horrible ball of flesh, hard as iron. Vyasa returns to remonstrate with her. If she had not lost patience, her son would have been of unrivaled splendor. However, all is not lost: he cuts up the ball of flesh into a hundred and one pieces, putting each in a separate jar. When the test-tube babies emerge, all boys except for the youngest, they seem normal, even splendid; but the Kauravas are inescapably demonic.

As the Pandavas exemplify the attributes of a healthy society, the Kauravas illustrate the monstrous consequences of incontinence. Dhrithrashtra’s congenital blindness and Gandhari’s decision on her wedding day to assume a permanent blindfold, establish a theme Vyasa returns to repeatedly in his depiction of the Kauravas: Evil is rooted in the incapacity or willful refusal to see reality. Every fateful choice as they spiral down to doom illustrates the delusive power of egotism, greed, anger, hate and envy. No Satan plots their downfall, for Hinduism has no such entity; what seals their fate is a failure of compassion, the inability to see the kinship of all things underlying the world’s vast differentiation; without that spiritual cognition, they lack understanding and misjudge reality at every turn.

Such hidden teachings appear throughout the narrative and have generally gone unremarked because attention has focused overwhelmingly on the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna’s counsel to Arjuna on the battlefield at Kurukshetra. The spiritual teachings of the Gita have also overshadowed the advice on matters relevant to social and political governance in the Book of Peace (the longest section of the epic) and Book of Instruction, which follow immediately after the profound lamentation of the Stree Parva (Book of Women) at the end of the war.

It is important to note that while Vyasa emphasizes Kshatriya dharma in Krishna's counsel to Arjuna and the whole narrative hinges on a great war, the epic is solidly against the chest-thumping warrior code.

Understanding the Caste System

After the end of the Kurukshetra war Bhisma, the revered granduncle of the Bharata clan, lies impaled on a bed of arrows for an excruciating 58 days, waiting for the most auspicious time to die. It is the second dramatic freeze frame in the narrative. As the receding roar of armies underlined the urgency of Krishna’s advice to Arjuna on waging the battle of life, so Bhisma’s agony gives poignance and edge to the practical guidance he offers to Yudhisthira, the new Emperor. 

An issue he addresses at length and with the highest authority is the nature and significance of the caste system. Quoting no less a personage than Shiva, Bhisma says: “Brahma himself said during the process of creation” that the “distribution of human beings into the four orders dependent on birth is only for purposes of classification. Neither birth, nor purifying rites, nor learning, nor offspring, can be regarded as grounds for conferring the Twice Born status. Verily, conduct is the only ground.” Any “pious person “imbued with knowledge and science, purified from all dross, and fully conversant with the Vedas,” should be considered a Brahmin.” It is “by such acts that a Sudra may become a Brahmin refined of all stains and possessed of Vedic lore. … A Sudra who has purified his soul by pure deeds and subjugated all his senses deserves to be waited upon and served with reverence.” Contrarily, a Brahmin who does not conduct himself like one deserves no respect.

That was not just ideal theory; it was the lived reality of caste through most of Indian history, attested to by British observers before the great uprising of 1857 gave them a political incentive to lie. Monstuart Elphinstone’s 1841 History of India, written after many years in the country, noted that: “In the main, the Brahmin rules of life have been greatly relaxed. The castes below the Kshatriyas have now become extremely mixed and extremely numerous; a servile caste no longer exists. A man who loses caste is excluded both from all the privileges of citizenship and all the amenities of private life. As a rule, however, the recovery of caste by expiation is an easy matter.”

The report of the first census of British India in 1871 said of the Brahmin caste: “there are few trades in which some of its members are not engaged. So minute and endless are the ramifications of caste, that, when Mr. Prinsep took a census of Benares in 1834, no less than 107 distinct castes of Brahmins were found in that one city.” That was nothing new: Bhisma noted a long list of occupations that disqualified a Brahmin from officiating at a religious ceremony.

How did we get the idea that caste preserved pure bloodlines and was an iron system of class oppression? We got it from European theorists who judged Indian realities by their own historical experience of societies formed by layers of defeated tribes. The conclusion that conquering Brahmins imposed the caste system on the diversity of India is patently absurd if we consider that they are about 4 per cent of the population.

Caste conflicts as they now exist are a legacy of the 1871 census which, for the first time, enumerated  groups and presented the system's fluid realities in a Procrustean hierarchy. It set off a great and rancorous competition among groups that was without precedent because it was never before necessary: throughout Indian history, evident in such illustrious examples as Chandragupta Maurya and Shivaji, caste status was open to radical adjustment.

The hierarchical British ordering of castes was deliberately malignant; as Dharampal noted, two-thirds of royal families in pre-colonial India belonged to groups now classified as “Other Backward Castes.” That was nothing new; the Mahabharata mentions Eklavya not only as the low caste boy brutally treated by Drona but also as the Nishada king who led an army at Kurukshetra.

From the British perspective, downgrading the status of influential castes was effective psychological warfare and sound political strategy. It set off bitter inter-caste altercations at every level as groups jockeyed for status; and the issues were petty beyond belief because there was nothing substantive involved. The murderous quarrels we read about today over such things as an upturned mustache or a turban tied too high were as unknown in precolonial India as the Hindu-Muslim “riots” the British engineered.

The Indian Intellectual Tradition

The compilation of the Vedas by the Saptarishis, the formulation of the philosophy of the Upanishads, the didactic use of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, all indicate the extraordinary capacity of Indian society to understand and meet existential challenges. The intellectualism evident in the formation of Indian civilization came to rich fruition in the millennia that followed.

Aurobindo Ghose (1872-1950), perhaps the most articulate voice of the Indian Renaissance in the early 20th Century, noted in an essay in Arya the “strong intellectuality” of Indian tradition. It was “at once austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement … a seeking for the inner law and truth of things … of each human or cosmic activity.” Ancient India had assembled a “colossal literature” on “philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences.”

India’s curiosity had “embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing; all the 64 accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind.” Even on “such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants,” each topic “had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature.” Such intellectual labour had “no parallel before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science,” Aurobindo noted; all “that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished … with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf.”

He did not note two attendant marvels.

One was that when travel was slow, difficult and dangerous, India sustained across its vast distances an intellectual community that shared works, debated differences, and agreed on conceptual outcomes. Benares was the hub of that community; the Buddha came there from the foothills of the Himalayas, Adi Sankara traveled up from Kerala, Guru Nanak came from the Punjab and Raja Rammohun Roy and Swami Vivekananda from Bengal. These are only some of the most prominent of the millions of Indian travelers who brought to life the rich cultural and intellectual life of a civilization all recognized as a unity spreading from the Himalayas to the seas lapping the peninsular spread of the country east, west and south. The role of masses of anonymous itinerants in shaping Indian society and carrying its impact to the rest of the world has been little noted. They took our cosmology, the Zero and differential calculus to China, Persia and Arabia (from where they spread to Europe). The Tamil gopuram traveled across the Himalayas to become the Pagoda of East Asia. The unarmed combat taught in the Kalaris of Kerala went with the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma to the Shaolin monastery in China, and the manual he wrote there disseminated the art throughout the region. 

The other marvel, unremarked not only by Aurobindo but by everyone I have ever read, is that Indian society and civilization were possible only because of the quality of the general mass of our people. Their reverence for the divine, their respect for learning and their generosity of spirit are the bedrock on which our leaders built. Those qualities allowed the Saptarishis to unify the tribes by compiling the Vedas; they assured the impact of the epic compositions of Valmiki and Vyasa; without them, Gandhi could not have succeeded. The fact that Indians for many millennia have accepted Rama as the ideal man and Krishna as the exemplar of wise leadership speaks to the quality of the devotee as much as to the objects of worship. The “Indian Dream,” even at the nadir of the Kali Yuga, has always been of God, and that has shaped our intellectual constructs, our expectations from life, our destiny.

The Nature of Reality

In the heyday of their arrogant power Europeans were given to dismissing Indians as fatalistic losers and contrasting our backwardness with their own world-beating "progress." Those attitudes persist even after the poisonous nature of that progress is widely known and hundreds of millions of people have paid with their lives in imperial contests for its temporary fruits. Many Indians continue to think that our traditions are a drag on progress, that bhakti is superstition, and that Western Science is a superior form of knowledge. There is an element of truth in those assessments to the extent that tradition is tied to ignorance, bhakti to scoundrels, and science to the healing arts. But beyond that, the European intellectual tradition is not superior or even equal to that of our own. To see why, we have to ask about the reasons for seeking knowledge and the nature of reality. Compare, for instance, the vision of the cosmos presented in the Mahabharata (the language has been thinly edited), with what Science has to say on the matter:

In the darkness there appeared the mighty golden egg Mahadivya containing the true light, the eternal Brahman, wonderful and inconceivable, present alike in all places, the invisible and subtle cause of entity and non-entity, progenitor of all things seen and unseen. From Brahman there emerged … after many eons the oceans, the heavens, the earth, the air, the sky, the points of the heavens, the years, the seasons, the months, the fortnights, days and nights, and all things known to man.

What is seen in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, of created things, will at the end of the world, and after the expiration of the Yuga, be again confounded. At the commencement of other Yugas, all things will be renovated, and, like the various fruits of the earth, succeed each other in the due order of their seasons. Thus continues perpetually to revolve in the world, without beginning and without end, this wheel of Time that causes the destruction of all things.

Science has validated part of that vision, finding evidence of Mahadivya in the Big Bang; but it has not ventured to express an opinion on what comes before the universe winks into existence and what will follow its extinction. That is because both Beginning and End are “Singularities,” beyond which basic scientific laws are presumed not to hold. Past those points, Science is blind.

On what basis does Hindu cosmology assert a continuity of cycles, each beginning with a Mahadiya? How does it venture the view that in between cycles Brahman continues to exist as unmoving Witness, holding incipient the explosive energy of the next Mahadivya? What significance should we attach to the overall Hindu concept?

To answer those questions we have to look at the nature of thought. Does each individual generate his or her own thoughts? Or are thoughts preexisting constructs that we merely perceive?

The entirety of Hindu tradition leans towards the latter. In our schema for training the intellect, the student phase is aimed at finding out what is known already and gaining the right orientation of spirit to allow the pursuit of knowledge, an essentially intuitive process. To be successful, the seeker must be in full control of his passions and have the mind in a state of fine concentration; then, prolonged tapasya (worship oriented to understanding), will reveal the truth about the specific object of inquiry. Put another way, the dedicated seeker with a finely trained intellect will be able to read the thought forms that constitute the universe. 

The evidence-based approach of Western Science is also oriented to discovering the laws that order the Universe; where it differs from India’s insight-based tradition is in motive and aim.

Science seeks understanding in order to manipulate and profit; the sages of India seek it to know the will and direction of the Universe.

Because of that difference, even when Science focuses on pure theory, it must proceed on hard evidence, quantifiable proof; and when the secrets of the universe are unlocked, the “applied Sciences” take over to turn erstwhile mysteries into profit or power. We can see the unavoidably demonic results in a world economy that is killing the planet's life systems, in the existence of nuclear and biological weapons that could end all life, in obscene inequalities of wealth and poverty, and the use of mass fear to control the world.

What this means is that our self-discovery in exiting from the Kali Yuga must be more than regaining memory of the past; it must look to the future and understand how to respond to the grim context of Western modernity; it must envision and move towards a better world.

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Part 10 will focus on what we can do to accelerate the end of the Kali Yuga

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8. 

A Hatchet Job on Sri Aurobindo

Peter Heehs, the American author of The Lives of Sri Aurobindo (Columbia University Press 2008), has been an archivist at the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry for over 40 years. However, long familiarity with his subject and with India has not translated into insight or even understanding. His 496-page tome seems to have been written by some racist koi-hai from the colonial era.

The "genre of hagiography ... is very much alive in India" Heehs writes. "Any saint with a following is the subject of one or more books that tell the inspiring story of his or her birth, growth, mission, and passage to the eternal. Biographers of literary and political figures do not differ much from the model. People take to the received version of their heroes’ lives very seriously. A statement about a politician or poet that rubs people the wrong way will be turned into a political or legal issue or probably cause a riot. The problem is not whether the disputed statement is true, but whether anyone has the right to question an account that flatters a group identity.”

Obviously written for foreigners who know little of India (the people at Columbia University Press?), those lines are absurd. How many “riots” can we Indians remember that were sparked by a comment in a book about some poet or politician? How many law suits? The overkill continues in a comparison Heehs offers between two photographs of Aurobindo, one retouched to erase wrinkles and make him fairer. Such retouching is a common free service provided unasked by Indian darkroom assistants and their modern computerized counterparts; but Heehs sees it as devious hagiography, intended to make Aurobindo look more saintly. Upon that overblown conclusion he hangs the following startling declaration:

“Hagiographers deal with documents the way that retouchers deal with photographs. Biographers must take their documents as they find them. They have to examine all sorts of materials, paying as much attention to the subject’s enemies as by his friends (sic), not giving special treatment even to the subject’s own version of events.” There is no mention of the biographer’s responsibility to try and arrive at the truth, an omission we could consider an oversight if the book were not such a study in dishonesty.

Another astonishing element of the book is Heehs’ assessment of Aurobindo’s mystical experiences. “In trying to trace the lines of Aurobindo’s sadhna, a biographer can use the subject’s diaries, letters and retrospective accounts," says the Preface. "There is also for comparison, accounts by others of similar mystical experiences. But in the end, such experiments remain subjective. Perhaps they are only hallucinations or signs of psychotic breakdown.” Even if that is not so, he asks, “do they have any value to anyone but the subject?”

Heehs gives short shrift to the claim that mystics access “a kind of knowledge that is more fundamental, and thus more valuable, than the relative knowledge of words and things.” A mystic absorbed “in inner experience … is freed from the problems that afflict men and women who are caught in the dualities of knowledge and ignorance, pleasure and pain, life and death,” he writes. “A mystic thus absorbed often is lost to the human effort to achieve a more perfect life.” Rather lamely he then adds that the value of Aurobindo’s life lies in his 40-year effort to “bring the knowledge and power of the spirit into the world.”

The Preface makes it abundantly clear that Heehs does not write of spiritual experience from personal knowledge. That conclusion is hammered in by the rest of the book, structured to reflect his view that Aurobindo had five discontinuous “lives:” as Son, Scholar, Revolutionary, Yogi/Philosopher, and Guide. Despite the admission that the “five lives were not sealed off from one another,” and that “in the end, [there was] only one,” it is obvious that Heehs suffers from a fundamental incapacity as Aurobindo's biographer: he cannot validate anything beyond the physical. In fact, even his understanding of the physical appears shaky. For instance, he thinks (page 203) the electron microscope rendered invalid Aurobindo's statement that a seed holds the "idea" of the plant it will become.

All that the electron microscope has done, all that modern physics as a whole has done, is to examine more closely the logistics and mechanics of natural processes; the Scientific Method cannot assess purpose and significance, the vital components of the "idea" driving them. That is why Science has been silent on such issues as the meaning of the Universe and human destiny. The discontinuities that Heehs perceives in Aurobindo's life are meaningless in the face of the "idea" incarnate in the foremost of India's modern mystics. However, they do help the reviewer filet the author’s misunderstandings.

Life 1: “Son”
Aurobindo Ackroyd Ghose was born in Calcutta on 15 August 1872, the third son of a young anglophile doctor in the employ of the colonial regime. Dr. Ghose was posted in the nearby provincial town of Rangpur, a name that Heehs says means "City of Delight." It actually means Colourful Place. Errors like that cast doubt on almost everything he reports. When Heehs asserts that Aurobindo's middle name was an afterthought, honouring Annette Ackroyd, an Englishwoman who came to India six months after his birth, the reader is inclined to ask for a verifiable source. And what is one to make of the completely gratuitous comment that Keshub Chunder Sen in 1870 was “the first Indian with flowing robes and an agile tongue to captivate a credulous West"? Raja Rammohun Roy and Dwaraknath Tagore made grand public tours of Britain several decades before Sen, and it was not just in the "credulous West" that crowds gathered to hear them.

When Aurobindo was five Dr. Ghose sent his sons to a mission school in Darjeeling, and two years later took them to Britain (along with his pregnant wife and infant daughter). The boys were left in the charge of an Anglican clergyman, William Drewett, who was asked not to teach them anything about India; Dr. Ghose hoped if they were raised British it would ease their path into the Indian Civil Service. The minister and his wife initially tutored the boys at home. Aurobindo was the brightest of the three and excelled at English, French and Latin. He won a scholarship to London’s prestigious St Paul’s School and did well enough in the first of a succession of ICS examinations to win an additional stipend. That allowed the brothers to scrape by, ill clad and ill fed through years in which they received little from home. Heehs makes no attempt to explain why their father stopped sending money, or why he began sending snippets from newspapers to show how "heartless" the British were.

Penury did not prevent Aurobindo from thriving at school. He excelled at Latin and Greek, wrote poetry, avoided games, kept pretty much to himself, and passed out with another merit scholarship, to King’s College at Cambridge. There he acquired his first knowledge of Sanskrit and went through the motions of studying Bengali from a British "pundit" who, when given a novel by Bankimchandra Chatterjee, asked in what language it was written. He took the "Tripos," the most difficult examination at the BA honours level, in two years instead of the usual three. (The exam got its name from the three-legged stool scholars sat on as they wrangled with complex questions posed by a panel of examiners.) Aurobindo got a first in the test but not a degree: that would have required another year at Cambridge.

Not to disappoint his father, Aurobindo sat for the final ICS entry exam; but he had no interest in becoming a member of that supposedly elite service. “He just did not like the English” writes Heehs. “Though he kept up cordial relations with individuals” he developed what he described later as “a ‘strong hatred’ of Englishmen in general.” The carefully tweaked image of the ICS was that it drew from the cream of British youth; Aurobindo found the reality of the exam hall different. The candidates were “shallow schoolboys” from “cramming” establishments, the “sons of small tradesmen … promoted from the counter … Bad in training, void of culture, in instruction poor … unmannerly, uncultivated, unintelligent.”

Aurobindo placed near the top in all the written exams but avoided recruitment by not appearing for the mandatory riding test. The ICS Commissioners wrote asking him to reschedule the test. He set a date but did not turn up; an official then told him to see the riding instructor, which he did not do. “Called to the office to explain, Aurobindo told a series of lies,” Heehs writes; he neither explains that serious charge nor says on what source it is based. After yet another missed appointment the Commissioners dropped him. It is legitimate to wonder if Heehs would have considered it less discontinuous if Aurobindo had joined the ICS.

Life 2: “Scholar”
From 1893 to 1906 Aurobindo worked for the Gaekwad of Baroda, initially as a bureaucrat, then as a teacher of English literature at the college established by that most liberal of Indian rulers. He also wrote the Gaekwad’s letters and speeches, continued his self-education in Sanskrit and Bengali, took up the practice of yoga, and immersed himself in the study of the Upanishads, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Gita and Kalidasa. On visits to Bengal he reclaimed other aspects of his Indian self. His father had died suddenly just before his return to India, but he re-established contact with his supposedly “mad” mother, his younger sister and brother, and an extended family. Aurobindo married, read voraciously on all manner of topics, wrote poetry, plays and political commentary; and under the guidance of a yogi from Maharashtra, Vishnu Bhaskar Lele, experienced for the first time “the silent, spaceless, timeless Brahman.”

His purely British upbringing and subsequent immersion in Indian life and lore gave Aurobindo the capacity, unmatched by any other Indian leader of the time, to see through the bluff of British power. He pilloried the pallid state of Indian resistance, declaring the country’s worst enemies to be "our own crying weakness, our cowardice, our selfishness, our hypocrisy, our purblind sentimentalism.” He was capable of seeing the true worth of Indian literature and religion in a way impossible for those accustomed to them from childhood. The Indian tendency to accept European “Orientalist” assessments of the country’s traditions irritated him. The Mahabharata was a far greater work than the Iliad, to which European scholars often compared it, in the process telling Indians their national epic was “a mass of old wives’ stories without a spark of poetry or imagination.”

He asserted the importance of Hinduism to the Indian future: if “we are not to plunge into the vortex of scientific athieism and the breakdown of moral ideals which is engulfing Europe, it must survive as the religion for which the Vedanta, Sankhya and Yoga combined to lay the foundations, which Sri Krishna announced and which Vyasa formulated.” If Providence had set out to design a leader to energize Indian nationalism there could have been no better plan than to have an exceptionally gifted boy sent off at a tender age to be raised British. Far from being discontinuous, the first two of Aurobindo’s “lives” shaped him for the seminal role he would play in the rapidly changing politics of the country.

Heehs is badly misinformed about the political background of the time. "With one exception," he writes, "any stirrings of revolt in the country at the time were momentary ripples on the tranquil sea of the Pax Britannica. The exception came from an unexpected quarter. Toward the end of 1903, the government of Bengal announced its intention to transfer the eastern districts of the province to Assam for reasons of administrative efficiency. Bengal was almost as large as France and much more populous, and there had long been calls to divide the province into more manageable units." In accepting the entirety of the regime’s rationalization of the 1905 division of Bengal Heehs turns a blind eye to malignant intent: the creation of a Muslim majority East Bengal was meant to divide Hindus and Muslims and weaken the mainstream Indian National Congress.

The "tranquil sea of Pax Britannica” Heehs perceives was actually the aftermath of the worst series of famines inflicted on India by British rapacity. In the last quarter of the 19th Century, as millions of people were starving to death around the country, the British exported rice at record rates, held a barbarously gluttonous "Durbar" in Delhi, made ruinously expensive efforts to control Afghanistan, and raised the regressive Salt Tax to pay for it all. Ill feelings against the regime were high everywhere. It was to channel them into a loyalist forum that a retired "Agriculture member" of the Viceroy's Council took the initiative to found the Indian National Congress in 1885. However, the Congress did not long remain as loyal as the British wanted and soon they had an additional cause of worry: the Muslim membership of the party rose in its first six years from two of 72 delegates (2.7 per cent) to 156 of 702 (22 per cent). As Muslim luminaries like Mohammad Ali Jinnah rose to the front ranks of the Congress leadership, the British took fright. The one indelible lesson they had drawn from the great uprising of 1857 was that Hindu-Muslim unity posed the most extreme threat to their rule.

The British motive in dividing Bengal was underlined by another initiative of the Viceroy in 1905: he got the Agha Khan (the third of his line to be a willing foreign tool), to assemble a collection of feudal landowners and establish the All India Muslim League. With rather less ostentatious prompting the Hindu Mahasabha also came into being a few years later. Like the League it was a British proxy, and over the next few decdes they drove the great communal bloodletting that climaxed in the Partition "riots" that killed over a million people and made 14 million homeless in their ancestral lands.

To begin with, however, the division of Bengal and creation of the Muslim League did not siphon off support and weaken the Congress. The League remained a paper organization for decades, with an affluent feudal membership so small that into the 1930s the quorum at its annual meetings was 10. The Congress, on the other hand found itself suddenly more popular than it had ever been. As its staid leaders took to addressing mass meeting to promote swadeshi and the boycott of British goods, legions of new young activists joined the national cause. The most radical of the young, including Aurobindo’s brother Biren, found inspiration in Italian and Irish revolutionaries and began plotting opposition to British rule with bomb and gun. From Baroda Aurobindo supported those conspiratorial initiatives, but there was a limit to what he could do without getting his employer into trouble. As a passionate new nationalism grew in Bengal he quit the Gaekwad’s service and moved to Calcutta in 1906.

Life 3: Revolutionary
Seemingly ignorant of the nationalist advances that precipitated the course of events described above, Heehs asserts that “between 1885 and 1905 the Congress achieved virtually nothing.” He turns a blind eye on the active British role in fomenting Hindu-Muslim antagonisms; in fact, he comes across as their apologist. “Faced with growing opposition from upper class Hindus, the British were in need of ‘native’ allies,” he writes. “One third of India’s population was Muslim. Lagging behind the Hindus in education and employment, the Muslims had come to believe that it was in their interest to establish a bloc to offset Hindu influence.” In that quote, note how it is “upper class Hindus” who opposed the British, while “the Muslims” had come to believe in the need for a bloc. That essentially British bias makes Heehs an unreliable reporter not only of Aurobindo as a leading opponent of colonial rule, but of Indian history overall. This is how he reports the Jallianwallah Massacre: “In Amritsar the British Army was called in to suppress a meeting. Hundreds were killed or injured.”

Some examples of bias are vicious. Heehs writes that Aurobindo, short of funds for two would-be assassins “suggested that they look for someone to rob.” The source of that monstrous charge is hearsay in a 1928 book in Bengali. Heehs does not examine the strong possibility that it was police propaganda; as with the earlier allegation that Aurobindo told a "series of lies," he is content to hit and run. At another point he describes the repressive “Seditious Meetings Act” of 1907, used to brutalize thousands of peaceful protesters, as “the bureaucracy’s way of dealing with violence and unrest.” Other examples of bias merely show his preference of perspective. The account of Aurobindo at the crucial Surat meeting of the Congress, an event widely covered by Indian media because it marked the parting of ways between the party's Moderates and Radicals, is based almost entirely on British newspaper reports. Inherent bias is the only explanation for Heehs' use of "Extremist" rather than "Radical" (the usual Indian usage), to label the Tilak-Aurobindo faction.

In recounting that “Hindu-Muslim rioting broke out in East Bengal” in 1906, Heehs notes (page 115) that “Aurobindo blamed the British. The Muslims had not planned the attacks but had been goaded by the government. The Hindus retaliated only after ‘serious and even unbearable provocation’.” Heehs himself ignores the ample evidence that the British pushed the country into a religious civil war to stem the rise of the nationalists. Instead, he blames Aurobindo and the "Extremists" for "giving a Hindu slant to the [independence] movement” (page 116). Evidently forgetful of the quote on page 115, Heehs says on page 211 that "Aurobindo regarded religious conflict as a purely social matter, refusing to see it as a vital political issue." On page 212 there is a more direct indictment: "Partition and the bloodletting that accompanied it were the [nationalist] movement's principal failings, and Aurobindo and his colleagues have to take their share of the blame." While holding Aurobindo responsible for events that occurred four decades after his retirement from active politics, Heehs makes not a single mention of the cold blooded British manipulations over that period to precipitate what is arguably the most murderous civil conflict in history!

After he moved to Calcutta from Baroda Aurobindo quickly became the leading spokesman of radical opinion. As the editor of Bande Mataram and working with Tilak within the Congress he helped shape the expectations and attitudes of a pan-Indian generation that Gandhi would mobilize in the final push to drive the British out. Although never an active member of his younger brother’s various plots, Aurobindo remained an important supporter and guide. There is no doubt that in marked contrast to Gandhi, he considered it entirely legitimate to avoid self-incrimination under repressive laws and to resort to violence when necessary. He made that explicit in responding to Rabindranath Tagore’s criticism of the hatred that drove the boycott of British goods. A “certain class of minds shrinks from aggressiveness as if it were a sin … The Gita is the best answer to those who shrink from battle as a sin and aggression as a lowering of morality. … Another question is the use of violence in the furtherance of boycott. This is, in our view, purely a matter of policy and expediency. An act of violence brings us into conflict with the law and may be inexpedient for a race circumstanced like ours. But the moral question does not arise.”

He discovered all too soon that it did arise: in the wake of an assassination attempt on a British judge that miscarried and killed two Englishwomen, the police raided Aurobindo’s house on 2 May 1908 and took him away in handcuffs with a rope around his waist. He was charged with being part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government. During the year he spent in jail waiting for judgment in the “Alipore conspiracy case,” Aurobindo experienced a spiritual transformation. As a schoolboy in Britain he had felt it his duty to work for the freedom of India; as he matured, that developed into a sense that he had divine protection in carrying forward the fight against the British. His faith was shaken during the first few days in prison.

“I faltered for a moment and cried out in my heart to Him: ‘What is this that has happened to me? I believed that I had a mission to work for the people of my country and until that work was done, I should have thy protection. Why then am I here and on such a charge?” There was no answer. Days of inner turmoil followed in his solitary cell in Alipore Jail until, in desperation, he asked for divine help and felt an instant calmness. Then came the voice of his inner guide: “The bonds you had not strength to break I have broken for you … I have another thing for you to do, and it is for that I have brought you here, to teach you what you could not learn for yourself and to train you for my work.”

Life 4: Yogi/Philosopher
Aurobindo has described the transformation that followed. "On one side was the jail workshop, on the other side the cowshed; these were the two limits of my free domain. Strolling back and forth ... I would recite the profound, inspiring and inexhaustibly strength-giving words of the Upanishads. Or else, watching the movements and activities of the prisoners, I would try to realize the fundamental truth that the Lord dwells in all. Repeating silently in my mind the words sarvam khalvidam brahma, 'All is verily the Eternal', I would project that realization on everything in existence -- trees and houses and walls, man and beast and bird, metal and earth. As I did this I would get into a state in which the prison no longer appeared to be a prison at all. It was as if this high rampart, this iron grating, these high walls, this sunlit tree with its bluish leaves and these ordinary material things were no longer inert objects."

Eventually he reached a point when he saw only God in everything around him. "I looked at the jail that secluded me from men and it was no longer by its high walls that I was imprisoned; no, it was Vasudeva who surrounded me. I walked under the branches of the tree in front of my cell, but it was not a tree. It was Vasudeva, it was Sri Krishna whom I saw standing there and holding over me his shade. I looked at the bars of my cell, the very grating that did duty for a door, and again I saw Vasudeva. … I looked at the prisoners in the jail, the thieves, the murderers, the swindlers, and … it was Narayana whom I found in these darkened souls and misused bodies.” His inner Guide continued to steady him, holding out the prospect of a new mission in life.

On several occasions he believed that the spirit of Swami Vivekananda spoke to him "about the processes of the higher truth consciousness" that later turned out in his own experience to be "precise even in the minutest detail." There were other voices too, but Aurobindo was careful to heed only those he recognized as meaningful and worthy. Looking back on this experience in later life he allowed that the voices could have been emerging from parts of his own subconscious, but that did not reduce their significance. Midway through his imprisonment he got what he considered an “adesha” that the case would end in acquittal and that he should thereafter undertake a spiritual mission so that a free India could be of “service to the world.” As it turned out, Aurobindo alone was acqutted of all charges: the judge, a former schoolmate, found the prosecution case against him too circumstantial.

After the year in Alipore prison Aurobindo returned to his life as a journalist by founding a new magazine, Karmayogin. It aimed at uniting India's spiritual and material worlds. The task, he wrote in its second issue, is "moral and spiritual. We aim not at the alteration of a form of government but at the building of a nation. Of that task politics is a part, but only a part." Karmayogin would seek to unite all aspects of life in articulating "the dharma, the national religion which we also believe to be universal." That universal religion was the Sanatana Dharma (the eternal law) that lay at the core not only of Hinduism but of all religions, and in bringing that message to the world India had a special role and destiny.

Heehs misunderstands the whole thrust of Aurobindo's thinking. "Although by no means a chauvinist" he writes, "Aurobindo was convinced of the essential superiority of Indian culture. A century later, when all forms of essentialism are suspect and national exceptionalism -- whether American, Russian, Chinese, Japanese or other -- is subject to well-deserved condemnation, one might wonder whether Indian essentialism and exceptionalism have much to recommend themselves."

It is difficult to understand how Heehs can have studied one of the most articulate spokesmen of the Indian renaissance for so long and yet be oblivious to the fact that one does not have to be a "chauvinist" to see that India is unique among nations. It is not only that unlike all other national claims to exceptionalism, Aurobindo's conception of India's special mission was "moral and spiritual;" its "essentialism" lay in the recognition of the universal in all humanity.

There is also the incontrovertible fact that India is the only nation that has a multimillennial history defined primarily by a sustained effort to comprehend the nature of Universal reality. The Indian national tradition flows from the Vedas to the Upanishads, to the Puranas, enters popular culture through the Ramayana and Mahabharatha, and courses unbroken down the centuries into the contemporary world. This is not to say it did not encounter blockages and periods of great difficulty. When the original tradition became crusted over with ritual and superstition the Buddha emerged with the spare re-telling of its great truths. When Buddhism lost energy, Sankara revived the old religion and set off the Bhakti tradition that strengthened Indians against invading Islam and eventually softened the foreign faith into the indigenous Sufi movement. Emerging from that milieu, Kabir and Guru Nanak, healers of caste and religious division, set off the streams of poetry and faith that became modern Indian nationalism. It is this extended background that explains why, when Raja Rammohun Roy took up the British challenge in Bengal in the 18th Century, the response came not just from there but from the whole country, reaching fruition in Gandhi.

That long continuum of some 15 to 20 millennia transformed tribes into castes, caste federations into unitary kingdoms, kingdoms into empires, and unified the whole with a common culture and philosophy. No other nation has a comparable history. In Europe nations resulted from conquest and oppression. Those who shaped Indian unity were sages, poets and philosophers inspired by a profound mystical perception of universal realities; they emerged from all parts of the country and from high and low castes. Heehs is blind to a history in which spirituality has been a primary structural element; he cannot see that Aurobindo’s significance lies in the fact that his thought and practice brought into the modern world the great insight of the Upanishads that under the material diversity of the world there is an indestructible Universal Spirit.

It was during Aurobindo’s lifetime that Western Science arrived at an understanding of that basic duality, first discovering that light existed as both particle (matter) and wave (energy), and then, in Einstein’s famous equation E=MC2, postulating the indestructible duality of the universe. Heehs seems to be ignorant of that aspect of science. “If Aurobindo is right that matter and spirit are different forms of a single unity” he writes, “it follows that there is a ‘scale of substance’ that links the two” (page272). In the long section of the book that deals with Aurobindo’s work in Pondicherry, the archivist in Heehs provides a useful overview while the author in him provides confused and misleading commentary.

For nine months after his acquittal Aurobindo stayed on in Calcutta, editing Karmayogin and practicing yoga. He was widely in demand as a public speaker. Amidst rumors that the British were preparing to arrest and deport him without the niceties of prosecution and trial he fled to French-controlled Chandernagore near Calcutta, and after a few weeks there, left for Pondicherry, traveling under an alias on a French vessel, the Dupleix. He arrived in Pondicherry on 4 April, 1910. Arrangements for his stay were made by the publisher of the Madras-based nationalist magazine India, Srinivasacharya Iyengar, who had also fled for refuge to Pondicherry. The editor of India, the poet Subramania Bharati, was also a refugee there. Like Aurobindo, he was a man of wide intellectual interests, and their talks were considered "variety entertainment" by the others in their group.

The refugees from Bengal led a Spartan existence in Pondicherry, eating just one meal a day, sleeping on the floor, sharing a single bar of soap and even forced to use a common towel. It was years before money ceased to be a problem. Beyond mentioning "supporters" in Bengal and a Madras businessman whose own dying guru 30 years earlier had predicted the coming of a guide from the north, Heehs makes no effort to explore the issue of who financed Aurobindo. He does, however, conduct yet another hit and run attack, citing speculation in a police report that violent secret societies in Bengal "probably helped him financially." If true, he comments, "this would mean that some of the funds ... were collected at gunpoint in Bengal, as armed robbery was the [Dacca Anushilan] samiti's principal means of fundraising."

Money only ceased to be a problem after a French devotee, Mirra Alfassa Richard, later known as "Mother," took matters in hand. She had arrived in Pondicherry with her husband Paul Richard before the outbreak of World War I. Both were spiritually inclined, and Paul was a prime mover in the founding of Arya, a monthly magazine of literature, philosophy and commentary; however, the war called him away almost immediately after its launch and it was left to Aurobindo's prolific pen to fill the pages of the magazine. The postwar influenza pandemic killed Aurobindo's wife, who had remained in Bengal, and it almost killed Mirra Alfassa, who had gone to Japan while her husband was a combatant. The Ashramites offended by Heehs' book have focused on his innuendo filled account of how she and Paul returned to Pondicherry, their estrangement, and her attachment to Aurobindo.

Life 5: Guide
In the final phase of his life Aurobindo's sadhna, spiritual effort, was directed at realizing and thus bringing into the world the potent supra-consciousness he perceived as part of the directive force of the universe. He kept a diary of his efforts for long periods, at other times he did not. The subject is highly esoteric and only those who have some personal sense of that superior energy can really appreciate what he was trying to do; there is little doubt that the long and lonely road of his experience was and remains important, pointing to a more spiritually evolved human future. Heehs' account of this period is without insight, and he has no real idea of Aurobindo's historical significance. (That incapacity seems to be widely shared among Indians: Aurobindo did not even make it into the top 50 listing in The Greatest Indian poll conducted by CNBC-18 to find the most revered personality after Gandhi.)

There are several levels at which we can assess Aurobindo's importance. His veering trajectory from boyhood in Britain to revolutionary nationalism and then yogic meditation in Pondicherry highlighted the value and worth of Indian tradition and flagged down violence in Indian politics. That prepared the way for Gandhi. For the inchoate generations that have struggled in free India to escape the deadening influence of our brainwashed historians and Golliwog media, Aurobindo has bannered the potential and scope of individual spiritual effort. Perhaps what history will hold his most important achievement is that in an age of insanely violent material ideologies his long fierce pursuit of a singular spiritual reality held out the alternative.

How real is Aurobindo's expectation that humanity is on the brink of broad-based spiritual progress? The answer is not all airy hope. Something of what he foresaw as the descent of the Supermind into human affairs is happening in the emergence of what Yuri Milner, the Russian Information Technology guru, calls the "global brain." The unprecedented global connectivity resulting from the spread of mobile telephone and broadband networks, engaging not only people but the machines that now process and store most of human knowledge, is creating a new level of consciousness. The "Internet of things" as Milner calls it, is expanding much faster than its human counterpart. There are some two billion people and five billion machines connected to the Internet today; in the next decade the number of individuals will more than double while that of machines is projected to reach 20 billion. In the same period almost everyone on the planet will be connected by mobile phone networks.

If the flashing synapses of this global brain are to develop positive patterns of thought and creativity, if we are to ensure that the planetary consciousness now descending on humanity will not take malignant and schizophrenic forms, we must look for guidance from India's spiritual masters, especially Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo.

Undemocratic Anti-Terrorism

The threat of a draconian National Counter-Terrorism Centre combining Intelligence and Police powers seems to have been beaten back, at least for the moment.

All major state leaders, including those supportive of the Manmohan Singh government seem to have opposed the move at the 5 May meeting in New Delhi.

I have to say “seem” because the meeting was closed to the media.

On a situation of critical importance to the future of Indian democracy the government chose to veil debate and keep citizens in the dark.

For this government that is par for the course.

It sneaked in changes to legislation on law and order to create a secretive and unaccountable Intelligence apparatus and is now trying to pretend that is no big deal.

The NCTC “will merely arrest and hand over people to the State police” the Home Minister was quoted in news reports.

He makes it seem so smooth, so law abiding, so impervious to the thuggish proclivities that have characterized “anti-terrorist” activity.

It is as if he never heard of encounter killings or custodial deaths of people manifestly innocent of anything but attracting the interest of gum shoes who think they are storm troopers.

So far, such malignancies have been confined to some states and rogue cops; the NCTC will make that phenomenon national and concentrate abusive power in very few hands.

Even without police powers our Intelligence agencies behave with scant respect for the civil rights of Indians.

I speak from experience about that, as can most journalists whose writings and attitudes have been noticed by the authorities. (The late lamented Dharam Shourie, PTI correspondent at the UN for two decades, told me that whenever he was putting together a politically sensitive story in Delhi a "telephone repairman" would magically appear to work on the connection outside his house.)

What part of my writings and attitudes has attracted the attentions of some agency of the Indian government I cannot say, but it has kept me under surveillance and periodically rifled through my belongings ever since I returned to India in 2008 after four decades in the United States.

The operatives involved have not been masters of their art, so it has been hard to ignore their efforts. In one case my tail followed me into a camera shop and stood behind me gesturing to the salesman not to sell me what I wanted; his image was clearly visible in the glass case we both faced.

At a meeting convened by Pondicherry’s “Progressive Writers,” I was examining my eyelids for holes when the speaker paused to observe that the “spy was asleep;” evidently he hadn’t got the memo that “progressives” should take the assertions of government agents with some salt.

The most recent evidence comes from an experiment I conducted: before leaving Pondicherry on 3 May I locked the door to my bedroom. In New Delhi on 5 May my bag was rifled in my Ashram room and the small bag containing all my keys taken. For some obscure reason they also took all my pens, including a marker I was using to highlight passages in a biography of Sri Aurobindo. 

If pure paranoia can drive agents of the Indian government to act with such breathtaking brazenness towards a senior citizen and life-long votary of Gandhi, what will they not do?

If this piece should be followed by my developing sudden multiple organ failure as happened with pacifist J. Sri Raman a few months ago, chalk it down to anti-terrorism.

In case readers think that is being overly dramatic: in Pondicherry on two occasions motorcyclists who had the look of cops ran into my bicycle quite deliberately and then took off. It was sheer luck that I escaped with only bruises and a concussion.

For the sake of balance I should add that in the United States I was also a person of interest. After 9/11 that was very much an in-your-face phenomenon, with my telephones broadcasting racist talk radio and periodic assaults on my car and house.  At one point a posse of plain-clothes and uniformed police appeared at my door at night and conducted an impromptu cross examination in the living room, vastly thrilling my young children.

Both in the United States and in India I interested the authorities not because of anything I have ever done but because I fit a profile they dreamed up. Perhaps it was simply that their cynical calculus could not compute my independence or idealism.

In such a world it is only prudent to refuse when a government demands an increase in its powers of abuse.

Understanding History: 4. The Future of the Past

Earlier sections of this series have dealt with the claims of colonial Europe to have a unique historical sensibility and the acceptance of that by Indian historians who have generally dismissed their own strong national historiography. This concluding section looks at why a globalizing world must reconstruct its past and how the Indian experience could be a model.

In two landmark essays on Indian history in 1912 and 1923 Rabindranath Tagore contrasted India’s peaceable diversity with homogenous Europe where “entire populations indulge in orgies of wholesale destruction unparalleled in ferocity in the history of the barbarian.”

When faced “with non-Western races in a close contact” Europeans never knew “any other solution of the problem but extermination or expulsion.”

Tagore noted that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata had recorded India’s achievement but beyond pointing to the interplay of the conservative (Brahmin) and dynamic (Kshatriya) elements within the caste system, he did not analyze how exactly India had melded its thousands of tribes into peaceful coexistence. To my knowledge, no one else has done so either.

In part the achievement was conceptual. The idea of a Universal Soul (Paramatma) provided a unifying umbrella for a wide variety of tribal beliefs and established with each of them a mutually legitimizing relationship.

On that shared spiritual foundation the Upanishad (discussion) tradition erected a structure of belief modeled on the easily observed seasonal cycles of Nature. It postulated the immortality of individual souls, all passing through many cycles of life and death in their evolution towards self-awareness and ultimately, the full enlightenment of merger with the Universal Soul.

As the individual's long passage to enlightenment occurred within the matrix of universal law (Dharma) and the moral causality of action (Karma), it emphasized individual responsibility and modulated the collectivist passions of the tribe. That allowed diverse groups to maintain their autonomy of custom and ceremony while settling into functional interdependence. The result was the caste system, a loosely hierarchical order that was essentially obedient to function, although its propagandists claimed it was divinely ordained.

A second aspect of the Indian achievement was the inspired story-telling of its two great Epics. They not only incorporated the complex teachings of the Upanishads into gripping and hugely popular stories, they spun all tribal beliefs into narratives reinforcing a core set of values.

Reworked into local storytelling traditions over many generations the Ramayana and Mahabharata shaped the common denominators of a culture that made India a nation unlike any known to the fiercely tribal nations of Europe.

The British in their efforts to maintain an always tenuous hold on India did much to subvert and poison the relations between its many groups. The caste system was a particular object of malign policy because it seemed to be the bulwark of the country’s resistance to religious conversion and manipulation. In that context it is interesting to note early 19th Century British assessments of the caste system.

Monstuart Elphinstone, who spent many years in the country, described the caste system as without rigor in his 1841 History of India. “The Brahmins claim that they alone now have preserved their lineage in its purity. The Rajputs, however, claim to be pure Kshatriyas. In the main, the Brahmin rules of life have been greatly relaxed. The castes below the Kshatriyas have now become extremely mixed and extremely numerous; a servile caste no longer exists. A man who loses caste is excluded both from all the privileges of citizenship and all the amenities of private life. As a rule, however, the recovery of caste by expiation is an easy matter.”

By the end of the century British writers were presenting the system as irretrievably rigid, ruled by iron custom set in place by the Brahmin caste to maintain its own superiority.
 
There was indeed an increase in the rigidity of the caste system in the 19th Century, but it had little to do with Brahmins: it was almost entirely the result of the first census of India (1871), which not only enumerated castes but presented them in hierarchical order.

The muddled British understanding of a complex and fluid system caused a great outcry across India but the damage could not be undone. Caste relations were embittered and subsequent British manipulations made things steadily worse. Thenceforth Indian reformers had to take in hand not only the many oppressive corruptions that had fractured caste relations over the millennia they had to wage a constant ideological battle with a Missionary-Bureaucratic combine seeking to divide and rule.

This background is important as we seek to move a swiftly globalizing world beyond the “clash of civilizations” model within which analysts working in the European tradition have conceptualized it. By further emphasizing the tribalism of religious faiths – the opposite of what traditional India achieved – they have made it virtually impossible to build a peaceful world.

In seeking to remedy this situation we must keep in mind the striking differences between the impacts of European and Indian historiography:

1. European historiography has bred unceasing war by accentuating the particularities of competing groups; far from modulating conflict the commonalities of religion have been a potent cause of violent intra-European intolerance and conflict.

2. The Indian approach to history shaped an overall understanding of the human condition that tamped down tribal hostilities and allowed widely diverse groups to coexist in peaceful interdependence.

In a world where hundreds of millions of people deride spiritual faith as delusion and billions frame their religious beliefs with missionary intolerance it will not be easy to construct a modern historiography based on the Indian model. However, the “sitting together” tradition of the Upanishads does offer a way to deal with existing differences.

It could probably be most effectively revived under the umbrella of UNESCO’s World History program. To begin with, a series of structured international discussions could bring into a common frame the different perceptions of the universe as metaphysical and our knowledge of it as phenomena; that is to say, the spiritual and the scientific.

Shorn of its usual shrill juvenile aspects, such a discussion would make clear that there is no fundamental conflict between the two approaches.

Science itself distinguishes between the particle and wave natures of phenomena (the province of chemistry and physics respectively).

Science now also takes it to be axiomatic that neither matter (particle) nor energy (wave) can be destroyed; they can only be converted into the other. This supports the concept of an indestructible soul. The existence of the genetic code further supports the idea of a unique and transmissible individuality.

Scientific acceptance of a "Big Bang" that initiated the phenomenal world and the inability to postulate what went before that “singularity" closely parallel religious views of Creation.

The similarities of Indian Spirituality and Western Science are even more pronounced if we consider that both are based on the existence of universal laws (Dharma) and inescapable causality (Karma).

The great difference between the scientific and spiritual approaches now lies in the concept of divinity: do we live in an accidental or purposeful universe?

Rather than try to resolve that issue at the outset, the new global historiography could make it a key object of study.

Other key aspects of exploration would be the dynamic relationship of many diverse fields of human endeavor. At present historians put political and economic developments within a common frame of reference; we must also bring into an interactive picture a range of other dimensions represented by literature, art, science, mathematics, the use of technology and experience of the sacred.

In such a multifaceted context events and trends will take on entirely new meanings and suggest commonalities and inter-relationships that are now hidden. Tribal consciousness will blur as such understanding grows. (Of course, elite groups that benefit from social dissension will have to be countered.)

The Indian experience suggests also that a moral perspective will emerge from a study of history: some trends will appear beneficial, others demonic in impact. And beyond that duality there is a reality unaffected by either.

The end of the Mahabharata illustrates that reality beyond human definitions by having Yudhisthira ascend to Heaven, where he finds all the evil people he battled on earth; his brothers, the virtuous Pandavas, are in Hell. It turns out to be an illusion and that is the final teaching of the Mahabharata: both Good and Evil are part of Maya, the delusive fog that cloaks the changeless Universal essence. Dispassionate awareness of that reality is the foundation of wisdom.

We can experience a modern approximation of that realization by noting the net results of the terrible period of Western colonialism and industrial civilization.

The genocides of colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, the intercontinental flows of indentured labor, the planting of settler colonies in the Americas and Africa, and the emergence of global economic and political systems, all have churned the human gene pool into an unprecedented unity.

The revolution in racial attitudes that Mahatma Gandhi initiated and Martin Luther King made global (ironically, with the color-blind help of the mass consumer market), has brought us to a world more unified in its humanity than ever before.

The poisonous nature of industrial society has focused our attention on humanity’s close and custodial relationship with Nature.

Pushed, pulled and prodded, the human species seems to have been prepared for a major evolutionary leap, a new age.

Sri Aurobindo, perhaps the greatest visionary India has produced, touched on the potential of such an age when he wrote of a “spiritual religion of humanity” as the hope of the future. He meant by that not “what is ordinarily called a universal religion, a system, a thing of creed and intellectual belief and dogma and outward rite,” but the growing realization that there is a secret Spirit, a divine Reality, in which we are all one” and “that humanity is its highest present vehicle on earth.”

That would imply that the “human race and human being are the means by which it will progressively reveal itself here … [and] a growing attempt to live out this knowledge … not merely a principle of cooperation but a deeper brotherhood, a real and an inner sense of unity and equality and a common life. There must be the realization by the individual that only in the life of his fellow men is his own life complete.”

I think that passage sets out the overall aim for a modern global historiography.

The Indian Press - 5: Disgraceful "Elite"

After independence, as British-owned newspapers passed into Indian hands, they moderated their overtly anti-national agenda, but retained a manifestly alien worldview. It is important to understand why and how this happened, for the English-language Press became the dominant “elite” of Indian mass media, a primary force in shaping the country’s political life.

Three factors constrained the development of an indigenous worldview in modern India’s mass media “elite.” One was the nature of the Indian renaissance. Rooted in the Bhakti movement of the 15th and 16th Centuries, it defined a sensibility capable of political engagement but – as exemplified in the string of nationalist leaders from Rammohun Roy to Gandhi – essentially spiritual and ideologically inchoate.

The second factor has been the nature of those who have controlled the development of Indian mass media. With the exception of the Kasturi family that owns The Hindu, they have been business people with no background in journalism. None has had the combination of intellectual capacity and political acumen necessary to understand and define a particularly Indian perspective.

The third factor has been a continuing effort by Britain to maintain and promote its colonial era influence over the Indian intelligentsia and political system.

In the rest of this post I look at the first of these three factors.

***

 A decade after independence, Susheela Nayar, the young doctor who was part of Mahatma Gandhi’s small group during his final internment under British rule (1942-1946), published her prison diary.

Among the conversations she noted was one initiated by Pyarelal (her brother, who became Gandhi’s secretary in 1942 after Mahadev Desai’s sudden death). Pyarelal asked Gandhi why he did not “write a treatise” explaining his political philosophy and activism.

“The trouble is that I have to be Marx as well as Lenin,” Gandhi replied. “I have it all in my head. When the occasion comes I take out what is applicable to the situation.”

Pyarelal pressed him. “You can see the situation and decide as to what should be done. ... But who will give lead to the people when you are gone?”

Gandhi replied, “I cannot do what you want me to do. It is beyond my power. ... I am not the man who can write a treatise. I speak under inspiration. I cannot decide as to how I shall tackle a particular situation until I am faced with it.”

Gandhi was being overly modest. He had outlined his beliefs and action plan as early as 1910 in the small book, Hind Swaraj, and in the decades since then had explained his actions tirelessly in articles and speeches. However, what he had to say – that Indians should be guided by the verities of their own civilization and not be seduced by Europe’s deadly way of life – was so far from the political mainstream of the day that “practical” men dismissed it as moonshine. The Congress Working Committee refused even to discuss the proposals in Hind Swaraj – and that was after Gandhi had become the undisputed leader of the nationalists.

Was there no one within Gandhi’s own following that could have propagated his political legacy?

 There were three, but sudden and premature death claimed them all.

Maganlal Gandhi, who suggested the word Satyagraha when his uncle was searching for a term to describe his nonviolent activism in South Africa, was the mainstay of the Sabarmati Ashram; he died in 1928, as preparations got under way for the declaration of Purna Swaraj. It was a staggering loss, for Maganlal was the one person who had intimate knowledge of Gandhi’s thinking and the full range of his political contacts.

The two other sudden deaths occurred within months of each other in 1942, just before and during the critical Quit India Movement. Jamanlal Bajaj, who established Sevagram Asharam at Wardha to which Gandhi moved after quitting Sabarmati, was a business tycoon; he would have been an invaluable apostle. Mahadev Desai, Gandhi’s closest aide for 25 years, was the one after Maganlal’s death upon whom the Mahatma rested his hopes for the continuation of his political legacy. He died a week after moving with Gandhi into the malarial confines of the Aga Khan’s palace at Pune.

The cause of death in each case remained unclear. The three deaths eliminated those most capable of carrying on Gandhi’s political legacy after his own assassination in 1948.

Ironically, Jawaharlal Nehru, who declared eloquently at Gandhi’s death that his light would endure, was primarily responsible for dimming it in India. He set the country on a course emulative of European modernity that Gandhi had explicitly warned against; it became fashionable under him to consider India's traditions and civilization as problems to be overcome. Under such circumstances, the failure of the Indian Press to articulate a national worldview is excusable. However, it is not entirely comprehensible, for the intellectual vigor characteristic of Indian civilization seemed suddenly to desert the country’s intelligentsia. Sri Aurobindo, writing of the Renaissance in India in 1918, described that earlier energy:

 “When we look at the past of India, what strikes us next is her stupendous vitality, her inexhaustible power of life and joy … her almost unimaginable prolific creativeness. For three thousand years at least – it is indeed much longer – she has been creating abundantly and incessantly, lavishly … republics and kingdoms and empires, philosophies and cosmogonies and sciences and creeds and arts … palaces and temples and public works, communities and societies and religious orders, laws and codes and rituals, physical sciences, psychic sciences, systems of yoga, systems of politics and administration, arts spiritual, arts wordly, trades, industries, fine crafts – the list is endless and in each item there is almost a plethora of activity. …

“This supreme spirituality and this prolific abundance of the energy and joy of life and creation do not make all that the spirit of India has been in the past. … the third power of the ancient Indian spirit was a strong intellectuality, at once austere and rich, robust and minute, powerful and delicate, massive in principle and curious in detail. Its chief impulse was that of order and arrangement, but an order founded upon a seeking for the inner law and truth of things and having in view always the possibility of conscientious practice. … [India] searched for the inner truth and law of each human or cosmic activity, its dharma; that found, she labored to cast into elaborate form and detailed law of arrangement its application in fact and rule of life. …

“There is no historical parallel for such an intellectual labour and activity before the invention of printing and the facilities of modern science; yet all that mass of research and production and curiosity of detail was accomplished without these facilities and with no better record than the memory and for an aid the perishable palm-leaf. Nor was all this colossal literature confined to philosophy and theology, religion and Yoga, logic and rhetoric and grammar and linguistics, poetry and drama, medicine and astronomy and the sciences; it embraced all life, politics and society, all the arts from painting to dancing; all the 64 accomplishments, everything then known that could be useful to life or interesting to the mind, even, for instance, to such practical side minutiae as the breeding and training of horses and elephants, each of which had its Shastra and its art, its apparatus of technical terms, its copious literature.

“In each subject from the largest and most momentous to the smallest and most trivial, there was expended the same all-embracing opulent, minute and thorough intellectuality. On one side there is an insatiable curiosity, the desire of life to know itself in every detail, on the other a spirit of organization and scrupulous order, the desire of the mind to tread through life with a harmonized knowledge and in the right rhythm and measure. Thus an ingrained and dominant spirituality, an inexhaustible vital creativeness and gust of life and, mediating between them, a powerful, penetrating and scrupulous intelligence combined of the rational, ethical and aesthetic mind each at a high intensity of action, created the harmony of the ancient Indian culture.”

 To be continued.